More than 35,000 people call Richmond home.
They can be seen every day going about their lives. Driving city streets. Working for area businesses. Shopping their favorite stores. Grabbing dinner at restaurants. Walking their dogs.
Now, imagine those people as abused children. All 35,000 of them.
That represents Indiana’s child abuse problem. The Indiana Department of Child Services substantiated 35,561 cases of sexual abuse, physical abuse and neglect of children during 2016.
It’s a problem that plagues Wayne County, as well. Of those substantiated state cases, 344 involved Wayne County children. And 2017 started with 33 substantiated cases through January, a pace for 429 during the year.
Those 2016 state and county numbers even surprised Karen Bowen, the director of Wayne-Union County Court Appointed Special Advocates, but the fact that case numbers are growing didn't. CASA provides volunteer advocates for the court system, and she called the growth in case numbers “phenomenal.”
“I want to say it’s unmanageable, but we have to manage it,” she said. “It’s just huge.”
Statewide DCS statistics show a sharp increase over the past four years in neglect cases, which comprise the overwhelming majority of the substantiated incidents, a trend shared by Wayne County and the six-county Region 12 to which it belongs. During 2016, there were 30,229 substantiated neglect cases in Indiana, with 301 in Wayne County and 978 in Region 12, which also includes Fayette, Franklin, Henry, Rush and Union counties.